Visible Changes of Two Types: Manipur's and Rest of India's

Amar Yumnam *

Manipur is sick and what ever we hear and see here is sickening. In one of the films of the Fast and Furious series, a girl tells one of the main actors thus: 'You are not a good guy trying to act bad. You are not a bad guy trying to do good. You are a bad guy acting bad.' Let us paraphrase this thus: "The government of Manipur is not a good government performing bad. It is not a bad government endeavouring to perform good. It is a bad government performing bad".

Let me quote here to signify how significant the government is. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their book, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent The State published this year, thus: "WHY HAS THE WEST PULLED ahead of the rest of the world over the past three hundred years? And why has Western Europe, a mere proboscis of land on the far end of the Eurasian landmass, pioneered so much that is distinctive about the modern world? Historians have looked for the answer to this question in all sorts of places from Roman law, which entrenched property rights, to the Christian religion, which fostered moral universalism. But a large part of the answer lies in the machinery of government."

With the new global commitment for targeted reduction of poverty and ensuring a non-reversible sharing of development by the poor, the critical role of government is now under a renewed focus; this is amply evident from two studies to be published by the World Bank early next year (World Bank. 2015. A Measured Approach to Ending Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity: Concepts, Data, and the Twin Goals. Policy Research Report. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0361-1., and World Bank Group. 2015. Global Monitoring Report 2014/2015: Ending Poverty and Sharing Prosperity. Conference Edition.)

While I was in my teens, I could hear a comment very commonly uttered by the adults: "Have patience and observe. There is drama aplenty." This comment was about the social happenings around. Though the inimitable Shakespeare termed the world a stage, there is necessity for all the members of the society to be serious and responsible individually and collectively. This social seriousness is to be nurtured and coordinated by the agency called government.

Come government of Manipur, nothing seems to be seriously taken by it when it comes to the concerns and needs of the people and the society. A Primary Health Centre has just been inaugurated in Canchipur with fanfare this Sunday and within five kilometres from the centre and easy calls from all the health facilities in and around the provincial capital. Contrast this with the recent incident of a pregnant mother from Tamenglong dying on the way to hospital in Imphal.

Contrast this again with a recent incident of new-born dying in Chandel. It is as if only Imphal and around are important in this twenty-first century when the whole world is busy with the evolution and implementation of inclusive policies. One can take the examples to buttress this view from any sector - education, food, power, roads and what not. The primary imperative of the provincial government in Manipur today is to display a culture of comprehensive and encompassing thinking for development of the province.

Manipur has not experienced any semblance of modern and encompassing development governance all these decades. This has to be corrected with no loss of time. The urgency of this arises from two angles inter alia.

First, the collective social strength of Manipur has been weakening. While the rising predominance of self-centred functioning is visible, it is founded not on fairness but on fraudulence. So what we are experiencing today is a scenario of weakening social strength coupled by lack of pure competitiveness among the individuals.

Second, all these are happening at a time willy-nilly globalisation has already reached our social and economic doorsteps. The compulsions of this wave are negated by the weakening social strength and deceitful individual ethos. Together these two features can never match the calibre and competitiveness of the globalising forces. This is the milieu in which the government has to act.

We now see a kind of reinventing the role and functions of the government around the country as evident from the humming of activities and discussions in the offices and institutions. Nothing of this sort is yet to be seen in Manipur; it is true for all the offices and institutions located in Manipur and irrespective of whether they are State or Central.

Even the way the electoral politics, which has just been played out in Manipur in a bye-election, is an absolutely unsustainable one. While I started learning Economics way back in the 1970s, one common theme was one of markets failing to live up to the needs of the society. Then by the late 1980s, the issue became increasingly one of government failures - a situation where the government fails to deliver in any social function assigned to it.

We have both of these happening in Manipur. We also have now social failures and individual failures. The sooner we get out if this vicious milieu, the better would be for the people and society of Manipur both in isolation and in global context. This is where the people manning the government need to rise to the occasion and deliver for their own future and the future of the society.

The government performs good today and the society prospers. Or the government performs bad today and the society sinks. The time-frame is getting shorter by the day and decisions are to be taken and implemented. Well, the choice should be clear.